The Chroma Curve - painting light and shadow with oils
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- Опубликовано: 1 май 2018
- If you want to be able to paint light and shadow convincingly, you need to understand how the chroma of colour changes across a form from light to shadow.
In this recording of a live stream from May 2018, I talk about how to paint light and shadow convincingly, and demonstrate by painting four spheres of different colours.
Find out more about what I do and how I can help you paint better colour at my blog here: www.learning-to-see.co.uk/
I have watched several of your videos and for beginners you are the best I've seen. I have watched so many other tutorials, but you actually teach. I wish I had found your videos a long time ago. Thank you.
Kathy, that's great to hear! Thank you.
Your skill in nailing the colours is impressive, and inspiring to see you demonstrate in real time on camera.
Thank you :) The camera I was using for this video was not that great though, I have some better ones now so I must revisit this topic!
Thank you Paul from Southwest Louisiana USA. You help me understand chroma, which was very helpful. I'm sure it will make a difference in my painting. Thank you again.
you are better than my therapist!! i tube up an opaque sap green from thalo green, bt siena, little cad orange and indian yellow....works great. i studied with helen van wyke and she was a hoot thanx again very inspiring
thanks for being so generous with your time so many artists wont share there knowledge as freely as others but you have been very clear , I will be putting as much of this info as I can into my own work and hopefully I will see some improvements as up to this point I have been totally lost thanks again .
I learned so much about color from you. Thank you so much for sharing with the world.
You're very welcome Ellen! I'm really glad you're finding it useful.
Thanks as always..that skin tone info should be taught in schools, it's actually quite profound. A wonderful way to prove we are all more alike than we are different. Hope the new place is all you wanted and you all have a happy and healthy time there.
this has been amazing for me , really helped me a lot to see what is happening with light on the surface of an object. thank for your time . as I found myself always reaching for the opposite color on the wheel and although it gives the form it doesn't look like reality at all , time to practice now. much appreciated .
You're very welcome Peter, I'm glad it helped. That complements thing for light and shadow is a myth, by and large. It does happen, but only in specific situations, like strong sunlight o a white object. Most of the time. it just doesn't - especially with interior or overcast outside light.
I'm going to subscribe and press the bell icon very hardly....... Very easy way of teaching with full length video and very higher understanding and explaination of colors..... Its just amazing.
Good work and clear precise information 👌👌👌😎
Chroma has been a mystery to me. THANK YOU SO MUCH 💓!
Really glad to hear it helped Linda!
Thank you!
Amazing video paul!
Thanks!
This has been incredibly helpful. I think I had the assumption that I should just really stretch the halftone all the way across the light side of the sphere. Seeing you block in the light and dark and then the halftone is actually rather a quick gradation looks a lot better. It makes sense to really maintain that terminator where the sphere is no longer getting direct light
Thank you, Paul! you are right, not blue, but green and red.
I Paul thanks so much for all this useful tutorials... I checked the blog, but I was unable to find informations abuot the webinar, I would like to partecipate the next, so if it's possible let me know about the next ones
Sorry for the late reply Alessio, but the best thing to do is to sign up for the email list, then you get notified when I do a new one. Or subscribe to my channel here, and you get to see the replays :)
What an excellent webinar Paul. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge. Quick question: When you painted the skin tone, you called out the highlight as one step lighter in value and one lower chroma, but as you painted you followed the previous method of using increased chroma for the first center light color. Did you keep your first center light at the same value as your final highlight with just more chroma?
the followers of Henry Hensche's would be terrified by Paul's approach to shade color LOL
is that a parallel palette Paul ?
I have never used one
in italian we use croma (chroma) for hue! nomenclature is very irregular in this field
Oh no how confusing! Historically you have all the best painters though, so I think we'll have to let you go with it :D
That’s why international standards were developed
I especially appreciate the statement of painting light, and showing the demo of adding the shadow and taking it away, it's a dramatic improvement of still life's. I'm still unclear of "chroma".
Paul, have you ever tried (just for fun) Mark Carder's palette to try to achieve the colors in the Munsell color space? Evidently, it does not compare to having more pigments available, but I am curious about your experience if you have tried.
I have tried it, the range is limited - especially in the greens. It will suffice in a lot of instances and if you always paint lower chroma subjects then it does have a wide enough gamut. But inevitably there will be times when you simply can't reach the chroma you want at a given hue and value. I wouldn't want to try painting many flowers with it :)
Also of course much depends on how close you want to get to what you see. We often can't come close to the range of values and chroma in nature anyway, so we have to compromise. With a very limited palette, you just have to compromise more.
dove trovo le scale dei colori che stai usando?
i noticed that you started to paint on the white surface , and wondered what your thoughts are on starting off on a more neutral color surface as some people recommend , is there any advantages either way.
The advantage with a white surface is that it helps you to keep the chroma high in high value colours. The advantage of a neutral surface is that it's easier to judge the values as they go down. I mostly paint on white panels because I forget to tone them :)
Can you explain the type of paint pallette you have there? Thanks.
Sure, this is a palette that comes as part of the Day Tripper plein air easel from Prolific Painter (www.prolificpainter.com/shop/easel/). It's a plexi-glass palette, works nice but I've scored it a bit with my palette knife, I think glass is better - although heavier.
This is late but nevertheless true and that is your grays are too aloof. By which I mean to suggest the tones within the shadow box need to enter into the colour equation, at least nominally. This will impart greater energy to the local colour of the object, I believe. The gray paper is actually shining out with reflected colour quite strongly! Incidentally I like the mind space of your colour space! The quiet rythmn of your work reveals a lot.
How do I apply for the course?
Wow, well this is a very late reply, sorry! But the details of my colour course are here: www.learning-to-see.co.uk/mastering-colour
there are many ways to paint an orange....but what wonder what chroma is? thanks
Shameful there was no reply…
Chroma is simply the visual perception of a given colors Intensity under a given illuminance and value. That is how dull or colorful it appears. It is duller the closer it reaches gray, white or black. Although chroma charts in Munsell give an indication of “saturation” and “tinting strength” those are separate elements of color used elsewhere in different comparative models and are not actually a reference in Munsell charting. The best thing you can do is to follow the Munsell system by creating your own Munsell color wheel and charts using your own paints and your own standard of lighting. I advise that as you make your charts that you include detachable samples as well.
looks like a bit of color in the cast shadow, is that possible?
The hue of cast shadows is dependent mainly on the surface they are cast on to - in this case neutral. So the only way there could be any colour in the cast shadow in this set up is if it was reflected light from something else nearby.
Appreciate the simple practicality…makes painting much more fun. However, you might have been seeing remnants of wet color on the surface from the balls that were not fully cured-I did. But it must be said, gray is technically a color in material paint mixing as is white and black. Also, there may be some “color” influence via his lighting source and other bounce light sources. Recognizing the fact that one might be able to detect this influence more than others is also a factor. Then there is the influence of our RGB systems and any light and bounce sources on your end of viewing. So…scientifically there is color there and you can see it. You should simultaneously paint what you know and see according to your own knowledge and visual perception experience. I would be highly interested in seeing your point of view. Also, we do forget…that as the “colored” object is receiving reflected bounce light- it to is in turn reflecting that…interesting…
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There's a proper art-term for it, but the 18th and 19th-century landscape painters deal with the lack of chroma/value in their paints by either cheating the chroma/value at either the high-end or the low-end of their chroma/value scale compressing one-half of the scale and being accurate and faithful in the rest of the work.
I've never read or heard anything about this, but I'm very interested in researching this technique. If you ever rediscover the proper term, please let us know - cheers!
What do you mean by cheating the chroma?
Smoke another one, Cheech.
He’s not wrong. I’ve heard the term Scale Compression a few times. We all do it anyway, naturally. We can’t hit every value, chroma, and color-especially when we limit our palette’s. Not even the realist of realist painters will do the minutest of changes actually being seen. Hence we all compress our HVC scales…just like Munsell does or Paul should have done when he ran into his Yellow ball dilemma. But he chose to compress by leaving out the next step and let the mind fill in the rest. What should have been done was to compress the high chroma/value down 1 step or 2. The standard viewer isn’t even gonna know. Most artists don’t actually even Hue match when they actually can…they will settle for “close enough” or “I really don’t care…I like this color”